I must say, I didn't really know what Discord was until I Googled it yesterday. I've head about it on some tech related websites, but that's about it.

Now I'm sure it works fine, but I'm afraid it would end up to be yet another communication platform to keep track of and that it won't replace IRC completely since many regular users are simply accustomed to IRC. We already have phpBB.com community, Area51 community, Github discussions and IRC. It's hard enough to keep track of all those.

Above message may contain errors in grammar, spelling or wrongly chosen words. This is because I'm not a native speaker. My apologies in advance.

Don’t forget tracker the real issue is that we would have convert everything from one platform to the other. Having more than one is not practical. We have a lot of mods and infrastructure built into our irc. Not to mention that we own it. We have actually discussed slack before on here but t do not have the time to dedicate to recreating all the granted functionality and manage the software. Granted discord is somewhat simpler to work with than slack. Frankly I would prefer slack or discord but there is a lot of individuals who may not for several of the reasons I have listed and possibly more

I personally see no benefit to making a move to whatever is more popular today. IRC is easily available with a web client for everyone.

I've run a development community for an open source project since 2004. We've primarily communicated on our phpBB forums, but also had an IRC channel that wasn't as frequently used. About a year ago we moved to Discord and the improvement in community engagement was absolutely incredible. So much so that the majority of our development discussions moved from the forums to Discord. It's been an absolutely positive benefit to our community and has brought in more developers and users and improved their engagement than we have ever had with our iRC channel (which we have since completely abandoned). I should also mention that we initially gave Slack a try, but decided it didn't work for us because there was no way (at the time) for us to just make our server completely public so that anyone could hop in and start talking (they'd have to register with the server first and have it approved by an admin).

The major problem with IRC is that it doesn't retain chat history (I know the phpBB channels are logged, but a user doesn't have access to those logs). I'm new to phpBB development and have been working on an extension for the past couple weeks. I tried dropping in the phpBB IRC channels to ask a couple questions on a few occasions. Each time I got no response after waiting hours, and as soon as I had to exit the client/shutdown my computer I lost my chance at getting an answer. Discord saves the history so if I ask a question, logout, and then login hours/days/weeks later I can see what was said. I really think it would benefit your community to at least give it a try. Setup takes just a few minutes and if it doesn't work out, it's even easier to just drop it.

In fact, the extension that I mentioned that I am working on is one that ties phpBB and Discord together. One of the unfortunate side effects of our community being so engaged in Discord is that our forums haven't had as much activity as they have in the past (which are still superior to Discord/IRC/Slack for certain forms of conversations). So I'm creating this Discord notifications extension that sends a message to a chosen Discord channel whenever certain events on a phpBB forum occur (new posts/topics, update events, lock/unlock, and other changes in content). We also generate Discord notifications for repository changes and wiki edits, so this way we can use Discord as our central station to monitor project activity.

As a user and a new developer, I hope you'll give this more consideration than simply saying "we have IRC and that is good enough". Because for my own project, and for myself as someone who wants to be more engaged here, it absolutely is not good enough. I think you'd be surprised at just how much of a positive difference it can make.

I've run a development community for an open source project since 2004. We've primarily communicated on our phpBB forums, but also had an IRC channel that wasn't as frequently used. About a year ago we moved to Discord and the improvement in community engagement was absolutely incredible.

What kind of a project do you maintain? Because I just can't imagine no one is bothered by the Library/Store links in the left panel and all that gamer stuff packed with the Discord... I know their API is as good as Slack's (we can post automatic messages easily), but I just feel Slack's more accurate for our kind of project...

I'm definitely open to other options instead of having IRC. However, I think that Discord is too focused on gamers. There are also other options like Gitter.im and Rocket Chat. The downside of Slack is obviously its limits that affect everyone not willing to spend a lot of money on it.

What kind of a project do you maintain? Because I just can't imagine no one is bothered by the Library/Store links in the left panel and all that gamer stuff packed with the Discord... I know their API is as good as Slack's (we can post automatic messages easily), but I just feel Slack's more accurate for our kind of project...

My project is an open source role-playing game, so yeah the gaming-focused nature of Discord is a little more aligned for us than it would be for phpBB. However, we make no use of the gaming-specific features of the platform. I never see the library/store links you mention because I'm always in a channel and that never shows unless you are on the home page.

I agree with you that Slack is more accurate for phpBB. I did and still do feel the same way about Slack being a better fit for my own project. I use Slack at work every day and I love it. But the nature of that service, where you have to register and be approved to join a server, is enough of a detractor that we couldn't justify using it.

I haven't heard of Gitter.im or Rocket Chat so I can't comment there. The three major things I dislike about Discord are:
1) Some integrations with other services don't exist or are more difficult to add than in Slack.
2) It's not open source.
2) As you both said, it's focused on communities of gamers and not built for developers. Although there's nothing preventing you from using it as such.

At the end of the day I'm not pushing specifically for Discord to be used if you find an alternative service that better suits the needs of the project and community. I just really wish I had an avenue for simple Q&A to more experienced developers here. Both IRC and forums seem ill-suited for that sort of thing.